Landon, I had a nightmare a while back and posted the scenario and solution on here. I wasn't dealing with Chef but Rails was very happy exporting invalid JSON from a character set perspective. Here it is again and hope it helps!
--- Problem --- I'm exporting a portion of a massive MySQL database that I'm thinking is better suited to a CouchDB database. The MySQL database supports a Rails application and the MySQL server is set to UTF8 for everything. I'm using to_json in Rails that appears to convert the records just fine to JSON. I get about 200 records converted and imported into CouchDB and then the process dies with "Invalid UTF-8 JSON". One of my fields in the offending record has the word "fête". The JSON produced by Rails doesn't convert this UTF-8 character to the JSON \u0000 notation. I don't think it should have to but maybe I'm not understanding the standard. --- Solution --- The original importer of the data took ISO-8599-1 data and jammed it into a UTF-8 field in the database. The character that I was having problems with was being auto translated when viewed in phpMyAdmin by the web browser using a kind of ASCII/IOS-8859-1/Windows-1252 fallback on non UTF-8 characters. So the character that looked fine was actual not UTF-8. I could cut and paste the converted Unicode character from phpMyAdmin right into Futon and the JSON was valid. The solution within Rails was after I converted the Rails object to JSON, I ran "json_data = Iconv.conv( 'utf-8', 'iso-8859-1', json_data )" to clean out bad characters. Worked like a charm! On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Landon Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > Response inline > > On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Randall Leeds <[email protected]> > wrote: >> If you recently updated couch be sure you don't have an old version of >> the mochiweb libraries around anywhere. >> See for example: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.couchdb.user/7780 >> > > Good hint. I double checked this and the only version that I have is: > ...../lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/mochiweb-r113 > > It appears that's an ok version right? > > Thanks, > Landon >
